Burlywood’s “TrueFlash” product delivers what they describe as a “software-defined SSD” drive. Since they’ve been active in the market they’ve gained traction in what they call the Tier 2 service provider segments (not the necessarily the “Big 7” hyperscalers).

They’ve announced TrueFlash Insight because, in a number of cases, customers don’t know what their workloads really look like. The idea behind TrueFlash Insight is that it can be run in a production environment for a period of time to collect metadata and drive telemetry. Engineers can also be sent on site if required to do the analysis. The data collected with TrueFlash Insight helps Burlywood with the process of designing and tuning the TrueFlash product for the desired workload.

How It Works

Insight is available only on Burlywood TrueFlash drives

Enabled upon execution of a SOW for Insight analysis services

Run your application as normal in a system with one or more Insight-enabled TrueFlash drives

This information can then be used to tune the TrueFlash SSDs for optimal performance

Thoughts and Further Reading

When I wrote about Burlywood previously I was fascinated by the scale that would be required for a company to consider deploying SSDs with workload-specific code sitting on them. And then I stopped and thought about my comrades in the enterprise space struggling to get the kind of visibility into their gear that’s required to make these kinds of decisions. But when your business relies so heavily on good performance, there’s a chance you have some idea of how to get information on the performance of your systems. The fact that Burlywood are making this offering available to customers indicates that even those customers that are on board with the idea of “Software-defined SSDs (SDSSDs?)” don’t always have the capabilities required to make an accurate assessment of their workloads.

But this solution isn’t just for existing Burlywood customers. The good news is it’s also available for customers considering using Burlywood’s product in their DC. It’s a reasonably simple process to get up and running, and my impression is that it will save a bit of angst down the track. Tomky made the comment that, with this kind of solution, you don’t need to “worry about masking problems at the drive level – [you can] work on your core value”. There’s a lot to be said for companies, even the ones with very complex technical requirements, not having to worry about the technical part of the business as much as the business part of the business. If Burlywood can make that process easier for current and future customers, I’m all for it.

So what is TrueFlash? It’s a “modular controller architecture that accelerates time-to-market of new flash adoption”. The idea is that Burlywood can deliver a software-defined solution that will sit on top of commodity Flash. They say that one size doesn’t fit all, particularly with Flash, and this solution gives customers the opportunity to tailor the hardware to better meet their requirements.

This isn’t really an enterprise play – those aren’t the types of companies that would buy Flash at the scale that this would make sense. This is really aimed at the hyperscalers, cloud providers, and AFA / HCI vendors. They sell the software, controller and SSD Reference Design to the hyperscalers, but treat the cloud providers and AFA vendors a little differently, generally delivering a completed SSD for them. All of their customers benefit from:

A dedicated support team (in-house drive team);

Manufacturing assembly & test;

Technical & strategic support in all phases; and

Collaborative roadmap planning.

The key selling point for Burlywood is that they claim to be able to reduce costs by 10 – 20% through better capacity utilisation, improved supply chain and faster product qualification times.

Thoughts

You know you’re doing things at a pretty big scale if you’re thinking it’s a good idea to be building your own SSDs to match particular workloads in your environment. But there are reasons to do this, and from what I can see, it makes sense for a few companies. It’s obviously not for everyone, and I don’t think you’ll be seeing this n the enterprise anytime soon. Which is the funny thing, when you think about it. I remember when Google first started becoming a serious search engine and they talked about some of their earliest efforts with DIY servers and battles with doing things at the scale they needed. Everyone else was talking about using appliances or pre-built solutions “optimised” by the vendors to provide the best value for money or best performance or whatever. As the likes of Dropbox, Facebook and LinkedIn have shown, there is value in going the DIY route, assuming the right amount of scale is there.

I’ve said it before, very few companies really qualify for the “hyper” in hyperscalers. So a company like Burlywood Tech isn’t necessarily going to benefit them directly. That said, these kind of companies, if they’re successful in helping the hyperscalers drive the cost of Flash in a downwards direction, will indirectly help enterprises by forcing the major Flash vendors to look at how they can do things more economically. And sometimes it’s just nice to peak behind the curtain to see how this stuff comes about. I’m oftentimes more interested in how networks put together their streaming media services than a lot of the content they actually deliver on those platforms. I think Burlywood Tech falls in that category as well. I don’t care for some of the services that the hyperscalers deliver, but I’m interested in how they do it nonetheless.

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disclaimer

The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by my employer and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of my employers, previous or current. This is my blog.

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